Argosy, Vol. 118, No. 4 — page 75: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

bf WHAT HAS ALREADY HAPPENED N oblong, bluish-green box, about a dozen inches long, by half as many wide, highly polished, » its sole decoration a single short line of archaic characters—this was the dread: talisman sold : by Jacob Lutz, curie dealer, to Jesse Robinson, millionaire engine-builder, and which drew into the wood of its strange and sinister influence Leilah Robinson, the old man’s niece, and Dr. Vanaman, whom the millionaire had retained as much as his guard as physician following the Green Invasion. Vanaman did not knew what to believe; he knew only that the old man guarded the box from some individual, or, rather, Thing, which sought it—and the curious, dread phenomenon of the first night, afterward repeated, filled Vanaman with doubt and unexplainable fear. And the manner of it had been this: first, a hissing, stronger and stronger, and then a green line under the door, edged with a pale foam and out of this damp greenness, rising higher and higher, a dreadful Shape—until—the spell was broken by his will; at his shout and upward leap all was as it had been before. - A dream—perhaps; psychometry—maybe. But Vanaman confessed that his hold on the material was slipping. And then, even as they watched, not once, but several times, the lettering, deep cut into the stone, reversed itself, sank down and through those unfathomable green depths until it rested on the bottom. ‘“ White Horses,” the sailor had said who had sold the curio to Lutz. And tragedy quickened to a beat of storm when Lutz himself committed suicide by drowning, first having been seen leading a white horse upon the sands. And the man could not ride. White herses—Vanaman knew their meaning, and the implication; he was familiar with Midgard, the great serpent, which is the sea; only a short time before Robinsen’s factory had been flooded, and in July. Irrelevant facts—perhaps. . Then, as he walked by the Delaware River with Leilah, they saw the tide coming im, salt, brackish. And as if that were not enough—as if fate were determined that they should by no chance, nor for the briefest interval forget—out of a byway that joined the road came a man— and he was leading a white horse! CHAPTER VIHUI. WHITE HORSES (continued ). from strain and lack of sleep. He halted, with a muttered ejaculation. “‘ What is it?” asked the girl. The surprise in her tone reminded him that Miss Robinson had not his reason for ve AMAN’S nerves were overtaut starting at the bare sight of a white horse. | Her attention in reading of Lutz’s death had been given to the fact of his suicide, almost ignoring the apparently irrational purchase of the horse, Mirror. “Nothing,” the doctor reptied to her query, and again they walked on. The man and horse were coming toward them, and now Vanaman himself wondered that sight of the pair should have so shocked him. Save for the fact that the horse was white and the man a man, they had hardly a characteristic between them reminiscent of the Atlantic City episode. Mirror had been a blooded animal, and so strikingly beautiful that even in the earlier newspaper account, before the re- porter had learned the beast’s pedigree, mention had been made of its appearance. This poor brute, on the other hand, might have been handsome a score of years ago; it was merely pitiful now. Gaunt, dirty, harness and collar-galled, its white hide yellow in great patches from lack of grooming, it limped along on swollen hocks like a very effigy of neglected, equine ald a age. | This stery began in The Argosy for March 6. 5 ARGOSsY 545 JOO (C(C) S (C(C)